SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Slow Horses” Season 6, which had its season finale on Wednesday. First the body count: over the course of the season the Slough House team, led by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, lost the psychotic yet endearing Coe (played by Tom Brooke) and honorary Slow Horse Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) while numerous of their nemeses also came to sticky endings, including two Russian assassins and a couple of British hired hands who found themselves on the same job. Season 6 also saw the return of Olivia Cooke’s character Sid Baker, who was presumed dead in Season 1 (although fans of the book have long been expecting her return), and the blossoming of her romantic relationship with River Cartwright (Jack Lowden).
But given “Slow Horses” has yet to showcase one functioning romantic relationship beyond Lamb’s love of fast food, viewers knew better than to expect Baker and Cartwright would get a night of passion let alone a happy ending. As Season 6 director Adam Randall tells Variety below, the actors did shoot a happier ending for the couple, which ultimately wasn’t used. Instead, Cartwright returns to his deceased grandfather’s home thrilled to see Baker has successfully evaded both the Russian assassins and MI5’s own rabid dogs.
As Baker showers upstairs, Cartwright faffs about in the kitchen, debating whether it’s better to woo her with tea or wine, before suddenly collapsing. The episode ends with him on the floor, struggling to breathe. A teaser for Season 7, in which Lamb refers to Cartwright as sending a postcard from “the afterlife,” has fuelled rumors River has been killed off, especially with Lowden said to be in the running for the next James Bond.
But as fans of Mick Herron’s book series know by now, things are rarely as they seem where Slough House is involved. To dissect the explosive last episode, director Adam Randall, who is also returning to direct Season 8, sat down with Variety to talk spoilers, rumors and more… It was difficult. Trying to make sense of the geography on screen was the main thing.
It’s all well and good on paper, and then you can never find a location that’s going to fit and make sense in the way that someone’s imagination can. So we needed to rewrite the sequence based on the location. But even then, you get to the location, and it’s still like, “Well, I don’t understand because surely Frank would just see them over there, and why are they hiding in a pipe over there?” and there’s all these sort of complications that come with it.
So there’s a huge amount of that which was solved with lots of different trickery, and then some VFX. We ended up having to put cliffs in and adding lots of tall grass and things like that because I just had to sort of make sense as to why they don’t just run off. Why is nobody actually escaping?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
